If you like to abandon your Yahoo Mail account in favor of Gmail, here’s some good news. You can now move copy all your old contacts and email messages from the Yahoo! inbox to your new Gmail address without having to worry about complex IMAP or POP3 configuration.
How to Move from Yahoo Mail to Gmail
Gmail now offers a new import mails option under Settings -> Accounts and Import. Enter the username and password of Yahoo Mail account and all the messages will be copied to your Gmail account in the next few hours. Once the migration is over, any incoming email on your old Yahoo address will be auto-forward to your Gmail account for another month.
The reason why I stressed Yahoo! Mail here is because it was the only web email service that required users to upgrade to Mail! Plus for them to move their data out to another email provider. That however changed with today’s announcement on the Gmail blog.
The Import function is currently available in new Gmail accounts only (not Google Apps) but it will soon be available for all so if you are in a hurry, just set up another Gmail account and use Mail Fetcher to copy Yahoo mails from this new address to your old Gmail account.
Related: Email Transfer – A Visual Guide
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/switch-from-yahoo-mail-to-gmail/8578/
Tags: Archives, gmail, import, yahoo mail, Email
Reader Comments
Is there a way to extend the period of import ?
Written by Balachandran on 05.14.09
I checked it and I don’t have that “Import” function in my gmail.
Written by Vitaliy on 05.14.09
“Once the migration is over, any incoming email on your old Yahoo address will be auto-forward to your Gmail account for another month.”
only for one month? no auto-forward after that? what does it mean?
Written by Ramanathan on 05.14.09
A picture is worth a 1,000 word. Thanks for the visual explanation. A we move closer and closer to a Googler lifestyle having our mail in gmail will make our lives more seamless and easy.
Thanks Amit.
Written by NeoTechie on 05.14.09
Honestly, its indeed a brilliant idea to consolidate all your emails in one account. I just hate logging into different accounts to check my mails (even though I use Gmail Manager add-on in firefox) I really love Gmail method of arranging sent and received emails in one thread, thus whole conversation is available in one click, as opposed to yahoo, its hard to keep a track of what you wrote and what reply your got.
The only problem with this is, you can not have Gmail replica offline. Gmail outage has becoming a big pain. I have a backup in Outlook 2007 that I connect once a week to keep all emails synchronized but its not exact replica when it comes to arrangement of emails.
If anyone or the blogger has any idea how I could keep emails exactly like Gmail offline, suggestions are most appreciated.
Written by TJ on 05.14.09